Night of The Long Knives - Purge

Purge

Further information: Victims of the Night of the Long Knives

At about 4:30 on the morning of June 30 1934, Hitler and his entourage flew into Munich. From the airport they drove to the Bavarian Interior Ministry, where they assembled the leaders of an SA rampage that had taken place in city streets the night before. Enraged, Hitler tore the epaulets off the shirt of Obergruppenführer Schneidhuber, the chief of the Munich police, for failing to keep order in the city on the previous night. He shouted at him that he would be shot. Schneidhuber was executed later that day. As the stormtroopers were hustled off to prison, Hitler assembled a large group of SS and regular police, and departed for the Hanselbauer Hotel in Bad Wiessee, where Ernst Röhm and his followers were staying.

At Bad Wiessee, Hitler personally placed Röhm and other high-ranking SA leaders under arrest. According to Erich Kempka, one of the men present during the raid, Hitler turned Röhm over to "two detectives holding pistols with the safety catch removed", and the SS found Breslau SA leader Edmund Heines in bed with an unidentified eighteen-year-old male SA senior troop leader. Goebbels emphasised the latter in subsequent propaganda justifying the purge as a crackdown on moral turpitude. Both Heines and his partner were shot on the spot in the hotel grounds on the personal order of Hitler. Meanwhile, the SS arrested a number of SA leaders as they departed their train for a planned meeting with Röhm.

The fact that no plot by Röhm to overthrow the regime ever existed did not prevent Hitler from denouncing the leadership of the SA. Arriving back at party headquarters in Munich, Hitler addressed the assembled crowd. Consumed with rage, Hitler denounced "the worst treachery in world history". Hitler told the crowd that "undisciplined and disobedient characters and asocial or diseased elements" would be annihilated. The crowd, which included party members and many SA members fortunate enough to escape arrest, shouted its approval. Hess, present among the assembled, even volunteered to shoot the "traitors" himself. Joseph Goebbels, who had been with Hitler at Bad Wiessee, set the final phase of the plan in motion. Upon returning to Berlin, he telephoned Göring with the codeword Kolibri to let loose the execution squads on the rest of their unsuspecting victims.